Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
At NYT, Jim Rutenberg briefly describes Nixon's war on the press and then writes:
The scandal he thought he had outrun, Watergate, would ultimately force his resignation. And his brazen anti-press moves, which initially appeared to cow journalists, would stall in an onslaught of revelations about his role in covering up wrongdoing in his West Wing.
That dark chapter in media history is suddenly relevant again, as the second administration of President Trump resorts to a heavy-handed approach to traditional journalists that has all the hallmarks of his predecessor’s attempted press crackdown some 50 years ago....
Much of the early action has emanated from the F.C.C., which is an independent agency with a bipartisan board whose chair is selected by the president. Mr. Trump named a longtime Republican commissioner, Brendan Carr, to the post in November, calling him a “warrior for free speech.”
Already raising Nixon-style threats to tie television-station license renewals to government determinations about content — which the agency has some leeway to do under regulations that still require licensed broadcasters to serve the “public interest” — Mr. Carr has revived previously dismissed complaints against the three traditional broadcast networks, and opened an investigation into PBS and NPR.
An inquiry into CBS played out in public in recent days when the network cooperated with the F.C.C.’s request for information relating to the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview last fall with Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Trump had accused the network, in his own multibillion-dollar lawsuit, of deceptively altering the interview to boost Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, which CBS denies.
Mr. Carr has said the outcome of the inquiry could factor in his agency’s review of a pending merger between CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and Skydance, creating a division between him and Democrats on the commission.
The lawsuits are part of a broader campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to attack major news organizations. This week, the president and his close ally Elon Musk falsely accused media outlets, including The New York Times, of being government-financed organs of the state. (Some government agencies purchase subscriptions to the publications.) Some of Mr. Trump’s nominees for top administration jobs, as well as Mr. Musk, have threatened to sue media companies for critical articles. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating outlets including NPR and PBS.
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Days before the presidential election, Edward Paltzik, a lawyer with a small New York law firm, sued CBS on Mr. Trump’s behalf in federal court in Amarillo, Texas. The suit argued that CBS “doctored” its interview with Ms. Harris to present her in a positive light, violating a state law against “false, misleading or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce.” It sought $10 billion in damages.
There was no evidence in the complaint that CBS edited the interview in a manipulative fashion, instead of for clarity or brevity. There was no evidence that the interview misled viewers or damaged Mr. Trump. And it was unclear what legal standing Mr. Trump had to bring a lawsuit in Texas, where he does not live and which was not the site of the interview.
But filing the suit in Amarillo meant it would be heard by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has been hospitable to conservative lawsuits that many lawyers regard as meritless.
About six weeks later, in December, Mr. Paltzik filed the suit against The Des Moines Register and Ms. Selzer in state court in Iowa, claiming that Ms. Selzer’s poll had been warped to harm Mr. Trump. The suit did not present evidence that the poll was deliberately skewed, that Mr. Trump had been hurt or that he had standing to file a lawsuit in Iowa.
